May is National Poetry Month

Friends, I am a poetry-lover. To me, reading a poem feels like eating a small, but decadent piece of chocolate torte. The words make me feel alive and human and pricked at the soul.

In honor of national poetry month, please allow me to share four of my favorite adult poems on the Tuesdays of May and four great ones for kids on the Thursdays of May.

“Hope”

It hovers in dark corners
before the lights are turned on
it shakes sleep from its eyes
and drops from mushroom gills,
it explodes in the starry heads
of dandelions turned sages,
it sticks to the wings of green angels
that sail from the tops of maples.

It sprouts in each occluded eye
of the many-eyed potato,
it lives in each earthworm segment
surviving cruelty,
it is the motion that runs
from the eyes to the tail of a dog
it is the mouth that inflates the lungs
of the child that has just been born.

It is the singular gift
we cannot destroy in ourselves,
the argument that refutes death,
the genius that invents the future,
all we know of God.

It is the serum that makes us swear
not to betray one another;
it is in this poem, trying to speak.